Twins in their final days of being five made drawings on my living room floor. One drew as though dancing, swoops and leaps, fast stops and flourishes, more sophisticated than scribbles, a choreographed abstraction. The other curled over his sketchpad and worked in silence until he came to the couch to show me what he'd done.
"This is the tower of the ghost rats," he said. "This is the kitchen where they make fried scrambled fox."
"That's what they eat?"
"Yes."
He pointed to a chamber at the lower half of the tower with bands of light color, pale yellow, pale green, pale pink.
"The ghost rats don't pee. Instead they release different colored mist and this is where that happens."
"I see it," I said. We both continued to look at his drawing.
"I don't think I'd want to eat a fox," I said. He didn't care. He knew what he could disregard. He considered his tower in silence. "They're like moving flames, like living animal flames," I continued. And he looked up fast and his eyes were lit and it is one of the best feelings to light up a kid's eyes this way. To find the thing that translates through the dull dust of adulthood and to see it land in the wild imagination, the fire behind the eyes. To light anyone up this way, to be lit up.
Earlier, his nine-year-old brother told me facts about a lizard I'd never heard of.
"What does it look like?" I asked.
"Well," he said, "picture a lizard."